Japan's first Western geisha, Sayuki, has revealed she is taking up a new role: lecturing on Japanese cultural studies at Keio University.
Australian-born Sayuki will teach local and foreign students about traditional culture from a foreign perspective and provide foreign perceptions of Japan.
During a recent trip to Australia, Sayuki said she is proud to be associated with the university, describing it as being at "the forefront (of) new and innovative ideas in education."
With some geisha nearing 80 years old, Sayuki believes they have "a lot of knowledge and experience to share with the younger generation."
"Geisha are important custodians of traditional culture in Japan, and I don't think it is surprising that a geisha should be invited to lecture at university," said Sayuki, who gave her first lecture on April 9.
Sayuki has lived in Japan for half her life. She first fell in love with Japan at the age of 15, when she was a high school exchange student. She then returned to study at Keio University.
After graduation, she worked for two years at a large Japanese company before earning her doctorate in social anthropology, specializing in Japanese culture, from Oxford University in England.
Sayuki has published a number of books on Japanese culture and produced anthropological documentaries set in Japan, including one on the cultural significance of some of the country's more dangerous festivals.
Upon her return to Japan, however, she became fascinated by the mysterious flower and willow world, as geisha culture is referred to, and embarked on a yearlong transformation from scholar to geisha.
She initially planned to do a short-term project but soon realized it wasn't feasible because of the time required to train as a geisha. She has since "abandoned all thoughts of finishing."
Sayuki describes the process of becoming a geisha as akin to learning a new language and culture. Trainees must be re-educated on the proper way to sit, stand, walk and wear their clothes.
Sayuki, who no longer uses her Western name, specializes in "yokobue" (flute) but was also required to learn the traditional arts of dancing, drumming and tea ceremony.
The thing she likes best about being a geisha is the access it gives her to the beauty and aesthetic sensibilities of that world.
Listing kimono, flower arrangement, dance, music, architecture and art, which make up the flower and willow world, Sayuki said there is no other area where you can see such a complete package of Japanese tradition.
However, she also warned of the unexpected challenges she encountered in the geisha process, including doing 500 squats in one hour at a banquet and having to remember the correct hierarchical order for addressing her 30 elders.
And then there was the problem of finding black contact lenses to disguise her green eyes.
Sayuki, which means "transparent happiness," debuted as a geisha in December 2007, in the process becoming the first Westerner in 400 years to do so.
She is now based in a geisha house in Asakusa, one of Tokyo's oldest geisha districts, where she regularly attends banquets as a trainee.
Sayuki is one of 45 registered geisha in Asakusa, and as an English-speaker, offers international visitors a unique glance into a subject that has long captivated foreigners.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/
Learning English By Eating
With many Japanese parents pulling their children out of private English language schools to save money these days, I recommend that they try home schooling. There is no reason why parents can't give their kids English lessons at home by leaving the teaching to food.
Yes, there are plenty of edible learning aids in our daily lives that we just need to put to work for us.
So reach into the pantry and pull out this week's English lesson!
• Alphabet soup — This soup, made by Campbell's, features alphabet-shaped pasta in tomato soup and is a perfect teaching aid for kids to learn their ABCs. They can sing the ABC song while eating with this new variation of karaoke (or is it "kara-choke?").
Make sure kids can recognize each individual letter and say it out loud in English before sucking it up.
• Gummi bears and worms — What child doesn't like to eat worms? These gelatin-based candies originated in Germany where the Haribo company first produced gummi bears, and the Trolli company introduced the gummi worms. Children can learn their numbers and colors with these sticky candy treats.
Group the bears and worms together according to colors and then count them, then have different color groups intermingle with each other. Kids will learn their colors and numbers with just a few snacks!
• Lucky Charms cereal — This is an American cereal with an Irish touch, made by General Mills. It is a perfect food to start your child speaking English words, mainly nouns.
The cereal contains toasted bits of oats and marshmallows. The marshmallows are the vocabulary aids as they are different shapes such as hearts, stars and moons. They make up 25 percent of the cereal content. Make your child say the shapes and colors before eating them.
Kids can also use the stars to re-create the constellations and the night sky, all without using a telescope! A quiz of the constellations would get your child off on the right foot in the mornings.
Not only will your child learn some new English words with this cereal, but also some Irish English as the jingle for this cereal features an Irish leprechaun singing: "Hearts, stars and horseshoes! Clovers and blue moons! Pots of gold and rainbows! And me red balloons!"
• Animal crackers — Animal crackers have taken the front role in educating children for over one hundred years. Having started in England, these fun classic snacks were made famous in the United States by Nabisco (National Biscuit Company) in the U.S., and have been exported to over 170 countries. Japan also has its own animal crackers.
Kids love animal crackers and will happily learn the English names of animals while eating horns, antlers, humps and trunks. Surely many kids already owe their extensive zoo animal vocabulary to these crackers. And since many Japanese people believe that hard crunchy food is good for the brain, this teaching method is a no-brainer.
What surprises me about animal crackers, however, is that despite their popularity around the world, they are still pretty basic. I mean, c'mon, couldn't we have some more advanced animal crackers?
Why continue to harp on the same old zoo animals such as elephants, lions, and bears when there are plenty of other animals out there that could benefit by gaining animal-cracker status? How about endangered species animal crackers, or extinct or protected species crackers? Most children will learn the zoo animals in just a few servings and will be eager to move up the animal chain.
Animal crackers Level 2 could include Japanese animals with crackers in the shape of cranes, deer, foxes, wild boars, bears, tanuki raccoon dogs, and Hokkaido red squirrels.
Animal crackers Level 3 would be endangered or protected Japanese animals such as the Okinawan dugong, iriomote cat, Noma horse, the sei whale, the Japanese giant salamander, the togenezumi spiny rat and the Okinawan rail, a flightless bird.
There are so many animals in the world that if we could get the cracker manufacturers to create new series such as the above to use as edible textbooks, we could work right through Japan's "red list" of endangered species. By kindergarten, kids could already graduate with degrees in animal crackers.
More advanced children can move on to grammar crackers, where they have to use the animals in sentences before they are allowed to eat them.
So you see, with a little bit of imagination and help from you and your pantry, your child will love English so much, he'll eat it up!
Amy Chavez
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/
Yes, there are plenty of edible learning aids in our daily lives that we just need to put to work for us.
So reach into the pantry and pull out this week's English lesson!
• Alphabet soup — This soup, made by Campbell's, features alphabet-shaped pasta in tomato soup and is a perfect teaching aid for kids to learn their ABCs. They can sing the ABC song while eating with this new variation of karaoke (or is it "kara-choke?").
Make sure kids can recognize each individual letter and say it out loud in English before sucking it up.
• Gummi bears and worms — What child doesn't like to eat worms? These gelatin-based candies originated in Germany where the Haribo company first produced gummi bears, and the Trolli company introduced the gummi worms. Children can learn their numbers and colors with these sticky candy treats.
Group the bears and worms together according to colors and then count them, then have different color groups intermingle with each other. Kids will learn their colors and numbers with just a few snacks!
• Lucky Charms cereal — This is an American cereal with an Irish touch, made by General Mills. It is a perfect food to start your child speaking English words, mainly nouns.
The cereal contains toasted bits of oats and marshmallows. The marshmallows are the vocabulary aids as they are different shapes such as hearts, stars and moons. They make up 25 percent of the cereal content. Make your child say the shapes and colors before eating them.
Kids can also use the stars to re-create the constellations and the night sky, all without using a telescope! A quiz of the constellations would get your child off on the right foot in the mornings.
Not only will your child learn some new English words with this cereal, but also some Irish English as the jingle for this cereal features an Irish leprechaun singing: "Hearts, stars and horseshoes! Clovers and blue moons! Pots of gold and rainbows! And me red balloons!"
• Animal crackers — Animal crackers have taken the front role in educating children for over one hundred years. Having started in England, these fun classic snacks were made famous in the United States by Nabisco (National Biscuit Company) in the U.S., and have been exported to over 170 countries. Japan also has its own animal crackers.
Kids love animal crackers and will happily learn the English names of animals while eating horns, antlers, humps and trunks. Surely many kids already owe their extensive zoo animal vocabulary to these crackers. And since many Japanese people believe that hard crunchy food is good for the brain, this teaching method is a no-brainer.
What surprises me about animal crackers, however, is that despite their popularity around the world, they are still pretty basic. I mean, c'mon, couldn't we have some more advanced animal crackers?
Why continue to harp on the same old zoo animals such as elephants, lions, and bears when there are plenty of other animals out there that could benefit by gaining animal-cracker status? How about endangered species animal crackers, or extinct or protected species crackers? Most children will learn the zoo animals in just a few servings and will be eager to move up the animal chain.
Animal crackers Level 2 could include Japanese animals with crackers in the shape of cranes, deer, foxes, wild boars, bears, tanuki raccoon dogs, and Hokkaido red squirrels.
Animal crackers Level 3 would be endangered or protected Japanese animals such as the Okinawan dugong, iriomote cat, Noma horse, the sei whale, the Japanese giant salamander, the togenezumi spiny rat and the Okinawan rail, a flightless bird.
There are so many animals in the world that if we could get the cracker manufacturers to create new series such as the above to use as edible textbooks, we could work right through Japan's "red list" of endangered species. By kindergarten, kids could already graduate with degrees in animal crackers.
More advanced children can move on to grammar crackers, where they have to use the animals in sentences before they are allowed to eat them.
So you see, with a little bit of imagination and help from you and your pantry, your child will love English so much, he'll eat it up!
Amy Chavez
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/
One Third Tokyo School Student Using Mobile Phone Filters
Only one in every three Tokyo middle school students has activated filters on their cell phones that block access to sites considered harmful to youth, a police survey has found.
Data was collected from 3,049 middle school students from a total of eight public and private schools in Tokyo last July in the form of a written questionnaire. Some 74 percent of the students owned cell phones, but only 36.6 percent had activated their filtering settings.
Since April 1, cell phone companies have been obligated to provide filters on cell phones sold to youth under 18 years of age. Though parents are not punishable under the law, they are required to inform cell phone companies if a phone they are purchasing is for use by a child.
Police consider parents the key to whether or not cell phone filters are used: Among the reasons given by students for not activating the filters, "Because my parents have not told me to" was highest at 42.1 percent. Likewise, the top reason for activating the filters was "Because my parents told me to" at 64.6 percent.
Filters generally fall under two main categories. "Black list" filters restrict users from viewing sites that cell phone companies have deemed harmful based on information provided by Internet research companies, while "white list" filters permit access only to study aids and other official Internet sites.
Under the "black list" system, users can access social networking site Mixi and other sites that Tokyo police are watching closely as sites that are increasingly being used as dating forums. The juvenile division of the Metropolitan Police Department is calling on parents to choose "white list" filters for their children to protect them from Internet crime.
Original articles
Data was collected from 3,049 middle school students from a total of eight public and private schools in Tokyo last July in the form of a written questionnaire. Some 74 percent of the students owned cell phones, but only 36.6 percent had activated their filtering settings.
Since April 1, cell phone companies have been obligated to provide filters on cell phones sold to youth under 18 years of age. Though parents are not punishable under the law, they are required to inform cell phone companies if a phone they are purchasing is for use by a child.
Police consider parents the key to whether or not cell phone filters are used: Among the reasons given by students for not activating the filters, "Because my parents have not told me to" was highest at 42.1 percent. Likewise, the top reason for activating the filters was "Because my parents told me to" at 64.6 percent.
Filters generally fall under two main categories. "Black list" filters restrict users from viewing sites that cell phone companies have deemed harmful based on information provided by Internet research companies, while "white list" filters permit access only to study aids and other official Internet sites.
Under the "black list" system, users can access social networking site Mixi and other sites that Tokyo police are watching closely as sites that are increasingly being used as dating forums. The juvenile division of the Metropolitan Police Department is calling on parents to choose "white list" filters for their children to protect them from Internet crime.
Original articles
Elderly Woman Fames In Japan
A 91-year-old woman, who spent her early years in the United States, is giving English lessons at her home in Kagoshima, which is gaining popularity among people who feel that regular English schools are difficult to follow.
Hatsune Honda started the Grandma's English Salon in June 2004. She was born in Taiwan on Dec. 15, 1917 but grew up in Los Angeles until she turned 13 years old.
Honda was once an interpreter for Sean Connery when the Scottish actor was filming in Kagoshima in 1966 for the movie, "You Only Live Twice." For her, English is easier to speak than Japanese.
Honda started the salon when her daughter-in-law encouraged her to teach as she is fluent in English. Honda was also feeling down after losing her husband.
She offers English lessons during the day, three times a week on weekdays for 500 yen for each lesson, lasting one or two hours. She teaches easy conversational English and colloquial expressions, and offers tea and sweets.
Her teaching style, her natural English sometimes mixed with her Kagoshima dialect, has become popular among local people learning English.
Michio Osako, 82, who has attended Honda's English salon for two years, said, "I can continue (taking lessons) as she teaches patiently until I can understand."
Honda said, "I'm really happy to have many friends come. I hope we can all visit Los Angeles together someday."
http://www.breitbart.com/index.php
Hatsune Honda started the Grandma's English Salon in June 2004. She was born in Taiwan on Dec. 15, 1917 but grew up in Los Angeles until she turned 13 years old.
Honda was once an interpreter for Sean Connery when the Scottish actor was filming in Kagoshima in 1966 for the movie, "You Only Live Twice." For her, English is easier to speak than Japanese.
Honda started the salon when her daughter-in-law encouraged her to teach as she is fluent in English. Honda was also feeling down after losing her husband.
She offers English lessons during the day, three times a week on weekdays for 500 yen for each lesson, lasting one or two hours. She teaches easy conversational English and colloquial expressions, and offers tea and sweets.
Her teaching style, her natural English sometimes mixed with her Kagoshima dialect, has become popular among local people learning English.
Michio Osako, 82, who has attended Honda's English salon for two years, said, "I can continue (taking lessons) as she teaches patiently until I can understand."
Honda said, "I'm really happy to have many friends come. I hope we can all visit Los Angeles together someday."
http://www.breitbart.com/index.php
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